Hello, I have been shooting for a little over a year now and really enjoy the entire process. I'm overall pleased with my work, however, have always felt as if my post-production work is a very weak link in my system of shot set up to end product. I have a bunch of climbing photos on my website at www.eastcoastclimbing.com Please take a look and let me know what things I need to work on to improve my post-processing. Thanks much.

I visited Lincoln Woods about 3 weeks ago. It was raining of course. It rained for most of the time I was in RI.

Great looking probs though a lot appeared to be tendon tweakers. My elbows and such aren't often into those games anymore. I can see it would become a small place very quickly and the highway noise disabused any illusion of country.

I would reduce the number of shots in your portfolio to only include the A-List.

Composition is the most lacking quality in most of the shots. Timing is good on most of the shots.

Yep - there are some great shots in there, but some less good ones that no PP is going to make great. The really goods ones are really good, and I don't know that PP is going to make them any better. Cut out the weaker images, and you are set.

That said, what are you doing now that you don't like? Are you using Photoshop or aperture/lightroom? What do you want to make better?

I really didn't look at the climbing shots, but the white mountains shots were great.

Really loved your use of lighting, and more specifically shadows.

There were a few shots I'd not have included in there, but overall the set was very nice.

Personally, I'm not sure what you want to get out of post processing. Especially for static scenes, you should be able to take a good base image in the camera, and just need to tweak some tonality out of it.

Well, I sort of skipped reading your post at first and just copy and pasted the link and my first impression was that the base images were decent, but that the post processing was the weak link. After actually reading your post, I realize that may seem like a redundant comment, but I put it there to say that I've independently come to the same conclusion as you.

The problem is, there isn't necessarily a right way to process the files. In a lot of cases, I don't even think that all that much needs to be done, but the shots just had a 'straight from camera' sort of feel.

I'm going to use one of your non-climbing shots as an example only because it's the clearest illustration of what I'm talking about. The very first picture in the 'other' section is a really cute shot of that little girl, but there's some stuff (maybe dried skin?) under her nose and on her upper lip, the left side of the image has a fairly pronounced blue/cyan shift, one eye is fairly sharp but the other is a bit blurry and, debatably, it's a little under-saturated.

The stuff under her nose is a quick and easy clone stamp/ healing brush job. The colour cast is also a quick fix. I will say that to me, as is, it appears wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean that having the colour cast is wrong itself. It just looks unintentional at the moment. There are lots of different ways to treat something like this, but it has to be based on what you, as the photographer, want the image to be.

In terms of the sharpness of the eyes, there are lots of different ways to address this, but I might try sharpening with a highpass layer first. There are also many different ways to address saturation, but i this case, I'd probably just use a hue/ saturation adjustment layer and play with the saturation slider. Really, you might prefer it the way it is already, but if you're going to display it in any sort of portfolio, it's worth giving in some consideration and playing around a bit.

Most suggestions I could make on your images are tainted by my personal tastes and there are too many photos to start any sort of meaningful critique, but if there are a couple in particular that you have concerns over, I don't mind throwing ideas at you (some of which you may find useful and others which you may not.

since the title is "honest feedback" I'll have to drift from your original question and agree with the others that, to make the biggest improvement in your photography, composition is probably your biggest weakness, not post production. a lot of the images are only good when they could be great - there's just something cropped wrong, the angle is slightly wrong, etc. focus on composition not post production trickery.

That said, if you want feedback i would say the first thing i noticed was that a lot of your sport shots are right at or even a little below the bolts and i found that a bit distracting. Maybe try some clipping or runout shots so that the draw isn't hanging over, above or on your subject.